


Of Mice and Mutant Demon Creatures

by earlgreytea68



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-24
Updated: 2014-08-24
Packaged: 2018-02-14 13:05:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2192868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreytea68/pseuds/earlgreytea68
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two world-class criminals. One mouse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Mice and Mutant Demon Creatures

**Author's Note:**

> Last night, I had to kill a bug. And I was like ::shudder:: ::shudder:: ::ugh:: And then I tried to make it better by reasoning, "I guess, at least it wasn't a mouse?" 
> 
> Then I woke up this morning and wrote this ridiculous fic. And there you have it: how my brain works.
> 
> Now translated into Italian: http://www.efpfanfic.net/viewstory.php?sid=2878936&i=1

Arthur has been working for hours when Eames finally deigns to show up. Typically, he goes straight to Arthur’s desk and crowds right into his space, leaning over him, lips by his ear. The most remarkable thing, Arthur thinks, frequently, about starting a relationship with Eames and deciding to try to keep it under the radar, is that it hadn’t required Eames to change his behavior at all. Eames still denies Arthur any concept of personal space and flirts with him outrageously and no one in dreamsharing blinks an eye because this is Eames and he will be endlessly chasing after Arthur until the day he dies. 

It’s Arthur who has to do all the acting, he thinks. Arthur who has to resist tackling Eames to the ground and tearing his clothes off when he does something brilliant, Arthur who has to come up with ways to shut him up when he’s being annoying that aren’t the usual excellent ways Arthur has discovered. And it’s all really annoying because, of the two of them, it’s Eames who is the actual _actor_. 

When Arthur once pointed that out to Eames, Eames said, _But, darling, you always tried to pretend that you didn’t have desperate, filthy fantasies about me, it’s the same situation for you, hasn’t changed at all_ , and Arthur had tried to break up with him one of the million times he had tried unsuccessfully to break up with Eames because Eames is stupid and charming and Arthur idiotically adores him. 

At this particular moment, Arthur does not adore Eames. Arthus is annoyed with Eames, and not the good-kiss-him-out-of-it type of annoyance. Because Eames had ignored Arthur’s seventeen different alarms to wake him up on time that morning because Eames’s opinion was that Arthur was working much too hard on a silly, simple job and Eames scoffs at Arthur’s motto of _There is no job too simple not to do perfectly_ because Eames says his motto is _There is no need to do anything perfectly and especially not jobs we could do blindfolded and tied up when we could spend the rest of the time in bed having a lazy shag, possibly blindfolded and tied up._

“So kind of you to join us, Mr. Eames,” Arthur says, not looking at his annoying face as he makes a cross-reference from one folder to the next on his desk. 

“We have a major situation,” Eames murmurs into his ear. 

Arthur’s brain shifts automatically into crisis mode, plotting out the possible checklists of what must be done, depending on the direness of the major situation. He looks up at Eames and says, “What?” 

“There was a _mouse_ ,” says Eames. 

Arthur stares at him. Eames’s face is all seriousness. Arthur has no idea what to make of this. He says, after a second, “Is this a…code word for something?” 

“It is a code word for _mouse_ ,” Eames bites out. “For disgusting, nasty, little rodents that carry rabies and plague and probably syphilis.” 

“I don’t know that you can catch syphilis from a mouse. Or, if you did, I would be very, very alarmed by your leisure activities.” 

“You’re missing the point,” Eames spits out at him. 

“I completely agree,” says Arthur, because, as usual with Eames, he has no idea how they ended up on the particular conversational topic of _mouse syphilis_. “What is the point you were trying to make?”

“There was a _mouse_. In our _house_.”

“Not our house,” Arthur corrects him. “You own that sorry little hovel, not me, and I told you how many times that it was dirty and disgusting?” 

“It’s authentic,” Eames protests. 

“Complete with an authentic mouse.” 

“You need to go and kill it,” Eames announces, loudly enough that they are starting to attract glances from the rest of the team. 

Arthur gives them all a tight smile that he hopes looks completely reassuring. “I’m not going to kill the mouse. Keep your voice down.”

“Why won’t you kill the mouse? I see you kill other things all the time.” 

“So do you. And it’s your mouse in your house.”

“And as we all know, by Dr. Seuss rules, that puts me in charge of killing the mouse?” retorts Eames. 

“Go call an exterminator,” Arthur hisses at him. “And leave me out of this.” 

“The mouse was at the _breakfast table_.” 

“If you’d come into work with me this morning like a _grown-up_ , you would never have had to see the mouse,” Arthur points out, reasonably. 

“Did you plant the mouse there to torment me?” 

“ _Eames_ ,” says Arthur, in exasperation. “There is no crisis going on here. There’s a mouse. An itty-bitty, tiny mouse.” 

“I take it back. I think it was a rat. It was definitely the size of my hand. No, my head.” 

“Call an exterminator,” Arthur tells him, firmly. 

“Everything okay?” asks the architect, with his eyebrows raised in pointed confusion. 

“Chivalry is dead,” Eames announces to the room, flatly, before stalking out and throwing over his shoulder, “I’m buying a cat!”

“I’m allergic to cats!” Arthur shouts after him as a reminder, and then turns to the rest of the team, who are all staring at him. “Everything’s under control,” Arthur assures them, and then works assiduously all day just to prove it. 

***

Arthur takes Eames’s files home with him because he thinks that’s just how nice a boyfriend he is, he will forgive Eames for being absent from work all day and instead give Eames lots of briefings tonight. 

He finds the apartment dark and deserted, and he frowns and calls Eames. 

Eames answers with, “The mouse ate me.”

“Clearly it didn’t.” 

“Chopped me up into tiny bits and ate me and I hope you grieve for me forever and feel great amounts of guilt and that you are haunted by mice the rest of your life.” 

“Not haunted by you?” asks Arthur. 

“No, that would be being too nice to you, you’d miss me and _want_ to be haunted by me.”

“Oh, of course, yes, absolutely, it’s my dearest wish to be haunted by you,” Arthur replies. “Where are you?” 

“Somewhere without mice.” 

“Are you going to tell me or are you going to make me find you?” 

“Hmmm,” says Eames, long and drawn-out, as if seriously considering. “Find me. You’re hotter when you’re being frighteningly competent.”

“I’ve brought all of your files home for you,” Arthur warns him. 

“Darling, I love it when you talk dirty to me. What’s _in_ the files?” 

“Pieces of paper,” says Arthur, as he locks up Eames’s hovel of an apartment and backtracks down the stairs, because Eames has become as predictable to Arthur as weather systems (which is to say: mostly, except when he does something completely unexpected that Arthur can’t explain) and Arthur will find him within minutes and they both know that. 

“Mmm, go on,” encourages Eames. 

“With writing on them. Words.” 

“Your handwriting?”

“Sometimes.” 

“Well, now, see, you’ve gone and got me all hot and bothered and if you don’t find me in the next ten minutes I’m going to go pick up some pretty young thing in a bar and it will be sad for you and this is all because you wouldn’t kill the mouse.”

“I’m hanging up,” Arthur tells him. 

***

“What is it with you and the mouse?” Arthur asks him. 

Eames groans extravagantly into Arthur’s chest. “In your head,” he says, “you have this lovely color-coded calendar, don’t you? And each day is divided into sections. And after the section blocked out as ‘sex with Eames’—”

“Yes, after that fifteen-minute block of time I set aside,” Arthur agrees.

Eames ignores him. “—the next section for you always reads, ‘Bring up the world’s most boring conversational topic in order to ruin Eames’s afterglow.’”

“Do I make you glow?” inquires Arthur. 

Eames shifts a bit so that Arthur can see his face. “No,” he says. “Actually, you’re pretty bloody terrible. And if you’re not going to kill rodents for me, I don’t see the point of keeping you around.” 

“You hate mice, Eames?” 

“ _Arthur_. Sometimes you ask really stupid questions and I really worry about your mind, darling.” 

“I’m just saying that whenever we stay in one of my places, you complain the whole time about how I’m too ‘neat’ and ‘ordered’ and it’s absolutely necessary for you to walk all about trailing crumbs and stray articles of clothing, which, I don’t even understand how you _have_ so many socks, I think you knit them when I’m sleeping or something, and I’ve only ever seen you wear the same three sorry pairs over and over until they are revolting—”

“Those are _lucky socks_ ,” Eames informs him, offended.

“And whenever I say, ‘Eames, could you not make an enormous mess of our living space?’ you accuse me of being prissy and stuck-up—”

“That is not what I say. I say you’re prim and adorable and then I fuck you to mess you up a little bit.” 

“Okay. Yes. Right. Fine. I’m just _saying_. I assumed you were used to living with periodic infestations of _disgusting things_ , considering the state of your apartments and houses and things.”

“I don’t like mice,” Eames says. “They creep me out. They don’t have bones.” 

“They have bones.” 

“They don’t _act_ like they have bones. It’s creepy. They have weird, boneless bones.” 

“I can never decide if there’s something wrong with you for being, you know, you, or something wrong with me for being here with you.” 

“It’s definitely something wrong with you,” Eames tells him, confidently. 

“Call an exterminator,” says Arthur. 

“And have strangers traipsing all over our apartment, asking why we have a cache of semi-automatics hidden in the clothes hamper?”

“Tell them you think that’s what clothes hampers are _for_ , since I’ve definitely never seen you use one for anything else.” 

“And you don’t know, they could bug the place. Don’t accuse me of being paranoid, we have enemies. No, I’m just going to get rid of the place.”

Arthur lifts his eyebrows. “You’re going to get rid of the place?”

“You don’t like it, anyway.” 

“Yeah, but you do. You’re obsessed with that stupid round wall part of the bedroom where no piece of furniture can fit.” 

“I’m going to put a sculpture in there someday,” Eames reminds him, because they’ve already debated that. 

“Not if you get rid of the place,” Arthur points out, bringing the point to its logical conclusion. 

“Well, we can’t live there anymore. It’s infected.”

“Infested?”

“Something bad.” 

“It was _one mouse_.” 

“Darling, you’re in charge of packing.” 

“I’m in charge of _what_?” 

“Of packing the place up.”

“I’m in charge of _packing_?” 

“Well, you can’t possibly expect me to go and pack up my things.”

“Why not? They’re _your things_.” 

“Mostly what’s in the place is the unnecessary amount of clothing you bring everywhere. So I guess we’ll just leave it and burn the place down.” 

Arthur makes a noise. 

Eames says, with exaggerated innocence, “Unless the clothing is very valuable, darling?” 

Arthur gets out of bed in a flurry of motion, which is a sign he’s irritated, because normally Arthur is very clean and precise in his movements. “It is a _fucking mouse_ ,” he informs Eames, as he pulls articles of clothing on. 

“What are you doing?” 

“I’m going to go kill the _fucking mouse_ so you can start behaving like an _actual deadly criminal_ again.” 

“That’s my vest you’re putting on there, actually—”

“Shut up,” Arthur snaps at him. 

***

Eames is cheating against himself at poker when Arthur arrives back. He is laden down with garment bags and holding, incongruously, an antique lamp that had been their first joint purchase together, giddy with the discovery of how perfect _they_ were in more than just sex (which had been expected and therefore not provoking of giddy discovery), and it is a hideous lamp, and they both hate it, and they have long conceded their perfection in most things expect for love-drunk purchases in Istanbul markets, yet they are doomed to keep the truly terrible lamp for the rest of time. 

Eames lifts his eyebrows and forgets to pretend that he was looking over Arthur’s files instead of playing cards. He just says, laconically, “Go well?” 

“That is not a mouse,” Arthur says, flatly, dropping his garment bags with uncharacteristic lack of concern for their well-being. “That is a mutant demon creature.” Arthur carefully places the lamp on the bedside table. 

Eames shuffles his cards together and tries to pretend he isn’t going to collapse into hysterical laughter in another minute. “Indeed?” 

“I didn’t break the lamp,” Arthur says. 

“Are we just making simple declarative statements at each other now?” 

Arthur says, “I may have broken other things in the place.” 

Eames can’t help it. He laughs because he has held it in for quite long enough. 

“It was a _mutant demon creature_ ,” Arthur reiterates. 

“Did you kill it, darling?” Eames asks, gasping with amusement. 

“I definitely scared it,” Arthur says, and then, after a moment, “I think. I don’t know.” 

Eames laughs harder. 

“Stop it,” Arthur scowls at him. 

“Last month you made Gurev the Bloody Cannibal Butcher _cry_ ,” Eames remarks, and positively howls with glee. 

“ _He_ wasn’t a mutant demon creature. You should have told me it was a mutant demon creature. You completely misled me, telling me it was a mouse,” Arthur says, sourly, and then drops sulkily onto the bed next to Eames. 

“Did you end up burning the place down?” Eames asks, fondly, and combs his hands through Arthur’s hair by way of apology for laughing at him. 

“No,” mumbles Arthur against the mattress. “I remembered that you had explosives stored in the fake freezer.” 

“Oh, Christ, I forgot about that,” says Eames.

“But I think it’s a crime scene now.” 

“It’s a what?” 

“Someone called the cops on me.” 

Eames considers for a careful moment. And then he says, “Arthur. Were you _shooting_ at the mouse?” 

“It wasn’t a _mouse_ , Eames. There was no _mouse_ involved. I’m telling you, it was a—”

“Mutant demon creature, yes, you’ve said.” 

“I’ll buy you another hideous apartment.” 

“It’s fine. It’s not like we spend a lot of time in this city anyway. And at least you salvaged the lamp for us, you closet romantic, you. The lamp, and your clothes. _Literally_ a closet romantic, you are.” 

“Hey, I just went into battle for you. I’m milking this romantic gesture for the rest of time.”

“Other people’s boyfriends bring them roses. You emptied a clip from a Glock at a mouse.” 

“Roses die,” Arthur tells him. “A discharged bullet is forever.” 

“You should write Hallmark cards.” 

“How do you know I don’t already on a freelance basis?” 

“Ah, so _that’s_ how you afford all the Givenchy. And here I thought it was our life of crime that kept you in bespoke suits.” 

“No, it’s the trite, romantic jingles I write. Definitely.” 

Eames looks down at Arthur and thinks, not for the first time, that he loves that he’s the only person who ever gets to see the Arthur who shoots ineffectually at mice and makes jokes about writing Hallmark cards. Thinks, not the first time, of how astonishingly stupid he had been to believe himself in love with the Arthur he’d coaxed into bed, when _this_ Arthur had been waiting for him all along, hidden underneath the Arthur everyone else saw, more fantastic in every way than anything Eames could ever have imagined. Thinks that he will never stop falling more in love with Arthur. Thinks that, on days like today, he feels like he falls more in love with Arthur on a minute-by-minute basis. 

“Thank you for trying to kill the mouse for me,” he says, by which he means _I love you_ and Arthur always knows the elaborate lines Eames devises in lieu of saying _I love you_. 

“Tell anyone in dreamsharing this story, and I’ll kill you,” Arthur replies. 

By which he means, Eames knows, _I love you, too_.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Mountain Sound](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10682442) by [Somedrunkpirate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Somedrunkpirate/pseuds/Somedrunkpirate)




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